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The View Of Diplomacy From Turkey
Apologies for not doing a better job of blogging while in Turkey, but last week was a very busy one. Now that we have left Ankara and moved on to Istanbul, it seems like a good time to set down some...
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Reflections On Military Coups And Other Things
I am back from two weeks in Turkey, and it was easily two of the best weeks that I have spent anywhere. The meetings were nearly all informative, the speakers engaging, and it was wonderful to spend so...
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Occupy Our Embassy In Ankara
UPDATED BELOW Earlier this week, Turkish pianist Fazıl Say was handed a 10 month suspended jail sentence by a Turkish court for the crime of insulting religious beliefs. Say’s sentence was based on a...
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More On Ambassador Ricciardone and Fazıl Say
Yesterday I wrote a post taking the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Francis Ricciardone, to task for his comments on Fazıl Say as reported by Hürriyet Daily News. According to HDN, when asked by reporters...
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Why Turkey Is Erupting In Protests
As anyone who has been casually following the news knows by now, Istanbul, Ankara, and other cities across Turkey are awash in protests, with calls for Prime Minister Erdoğan to resign and scenes of...
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What Comes After The Turkish Protests
Events in Turkey are still taking their course and so it is obviously premature to write any type of postscript, but I thought it might be useful to try and look ahead and game out some of the longer...
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When An Immovable Object Meets An Unstoppable Force
Prime Minister Erdoğan returned home yesterday from his trip to North Africa and immediately erased any hope that might have existed that he has been chastened by the protests rocking Turkey. He was...
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Turkey’s House of Cards Tumbles Down
The AKP was elected in 2002, and in the decade that it has been in power under the direction of Prime Minister Erdoğan, it has risen to enormous heights. The AKP has received credit for the Turkish...
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Erdoğan, Master Linguist
When the AKP came to power in 2002, Prime Minister Erdoğan and his party set out on an ambitious mission to remake Turkey’s economy and politics, turn Turkey into a regional power, and step up efforts...
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Guest Post: Does Erdoğan Need To Shift Course?
Dov Friedman – who is depriving the world of his prodigious knowledge by not starting his own regular blog – is resuming his spot today as O&Z guest poster par excellence to write about whether or...
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Turkey’s “Democratization” Package
Ten days ago, Prime Minister Erdoğan and the AKP released the details of their long-promised and long-awaited democratization package, which had been hyped for months as a major initiative aimed at...
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Graft, Gülen, and the Future of the AKP
For months now there has been open war between the AKP and its erstwhile allies in the Gülen movement. The feuding can be traced back to an overzealous Gülenist prosecutor’s attempt to interrogate...
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Tayyip Erdoğan, World’s Newest Billionaire
Let me stipulate from the beginning that I have no idea whether the allegations are true that Tayyip Erdoğan conspired with his son Bilal to hide one billion dollars once Turkey’s graft probe was...
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What’s Going To Happen After Turkish Elections?
The short answer is, nothing good. No matter how things shake out on Sunday when Turks go to vote in municipal elections, I don’t thing the results are going to alleviate Turkey’s current instability...
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The Problem With The Turkish Government In A Nutshell
Turkey is reeling over a tragic loss of human life following an explosion and fire at a coal mine in Soma, with the death toll up to 238 as of this writing and at least 120 miners still trapped. The...
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Checking In On The Turkish PM Race
Despite my instincts that Prime Minister Erdoğan was going to decide that it is better to be a super-empowered prime minister than the Turkish president under the current constitutional configuration,...
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Is Turkey’s Future A Liberal One?
Now that Prime Minister Erdoğan is set to take over as President Erdoğan, analysts are pivoting to figure out what comes next. While many are speculating about who the next PM will be (I still think it...
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Is This What A Presidential Takeover Looks Like?
For political scientists interested in political development, it is in many ways more interesting to study why democracies break down than how democracies form. After all, the best predictor of whether...
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Guest Post: Imagining the AKP’s Divergent Futures
Guest poster extraordinaire Dov Friedman is back with some inside baseball on the political prospects of Turkey’s Kurdish party and how its success or failure might determine Erdoğan’s future power...
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Guest Post: Is The CHP Restoring Some Of Its Mojo?
With the Turkish parliamentary election a little more than six weeks away – and being cognizant of the fact that I’ve been ignoring the Ottomans side of the blog in recent months – today’s guest post...
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